


Coup de Foudre

by folie_a_yeux



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Oral Sex, POV Multiple, Prompt Fic, Slap Slap Kiss, Tender Sex, badass ladies taking down villains and being cooler than you, lesbihonest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-02
Updated: 2014-04-02
Packaged: 2018-01-17 18:37:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1398328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/folie_a_yeux/pseuds/folie_a_yeux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Intramuscular haloperidol, with promethazine. Common for sedating violent psychotics. But you knew that, didn’t you?” Calmly side-stepping Hannibal’s convulsing limbs, the hands that lunge and tense without clenching. “It’s what you claimed you’d given my patient, after all. To convince me that he was safe.”</p><p>There is an icy rage in Bedelia’s voice, a tremor cutting her calm, measured words, betraying the fury steeling her body and daggering the limbs under the violet silk of her dress. Her face tightens, smooth skin over sharp bone. For a moment Alana is more terrified of the woman with the syringe than the monster writhing on the floor.</p><p>Prompt: I want a fic where Bedelia swoops in and takes Alana away from all this bullshit and they fall in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coup de Foudre

_Every person has an intrinsic responsibility for their own life._  
  
_I don’t feel like I dodged a bullet. I feel wounded._

  
All she can hear is the blood in her veins.  
  
Alana can still taste the salt of him in her mouth. Feel the rasp of morning stubble on her cheek. Smell the subtle cut of aftershave in the sweat on her neck. But all she can hear is the pulsing scream of adrenaline, her heart beating jaggedly between the certainty of training and the awful uncertainty of action.  
  
She trains her gun on Hannibal Lecter, releases the safety, and aims.

Alana knows everything Will told her is true. But there’s a difference between knowing and believing. Between shooting to wound and shooting to kill. Between letting herself be undone by Hannibal, or letting him make her undone.

It’s only now, as he closes in on her, as she can see his nostrils flaring, Jack’s blood spattered across his shirt, eyes deadened and yet somehow finally _alive_ , that she believes.

Her finger is pressing the trigger when she sees a flash of silk. When Hannibal’s back arches, when he lets out a small strangled cry, when he topples with an abrupt and ungraceful thud to the floor.

When Bedelia emerges from the shadow of the doorway, an emptied syringe in her hand.

“Intramuscular haloperidol, with promethazine. Common for sedating violent psychotics. But you knew that, didn’t you?” Calmly side-stepping Hannibal’s convulsing limbs, the hands that lunge and tense without clenching. “It’s what you claimed you’d given my patient, after all. To convince me that he was safe.”

There is an icy rage in Bedelia’s voice, a tremor cutting her calm, measured words, betraying the fury steeling her body and daggering the limbs under the violet silk of her dress. Her face tightens, smooth skin over sharp bone. For a moment Alana is more terrified of the woman with the syringe than the monster writhing on the floor.

“Jack,” she blurts out. Grasping at something to root herself in, to order the chaos, to still the gathering panic. “Jack. He’s wounded. We have to —”

“He's beyond our care.” Bedelia spares one fleeting glance at Alana before training her eyes back at the twitching mass below. “I’ve alerted the police. Either they’ll get to him in time, or they won’t.”

She moves behind Alana and takes her hand, tapered fingers over a trembling wrist. Clicks the safety back onto her gun. Lowers it down.

Hannibal is still lucid enough to lift his head, mere centimeters from the lush red carpet that blankets his hall — _to cover the blood,_ Alana’s mind screams, _oh god to cover the blood_ — and lock his bloodshot eyes on Bedelia’s face.

“Wouldn’t.” He chokes. “Her.”

Bedelia raises her voice, louder than Alana has ever heard her speak. It barely reaches a firm murmur.

“You betrayed me, Hannibal, but I keep my promises. It will wear off before the police arrive.” She casts one final, contemptuous glance down. “I have no intention of calling on you again. I trust you will pay us the same courtesy.”  


***

It’s only hours later, as Alana watches the mute screen play out Jack’s rescue, Hannibal’s escape, Will’s release, when she’s finished counting all the men she tried to save and the women she couldn’t protect, that she realizes she no longer cares what comes next. She has no part in this. She refuses to.  
  
She lies easily to the officer who calls, who informs her of the horrors they found in Hannibal’s kitchen, in his basement. She’s a natural liar, her essential warmth an easy, and comfortable, mask. Armor against the catcalls in her early days in the bureau, the jeers that dug at fresh skin.  
  
It had probably been that paradox, the riddle of the honest liar, that had drawn Hannibal — _don’t think of him_ , she begs herself, _don’t think of it_ , but of course she’s too good a psychiatrist to pay attention — that had drawn Hannibal to her in the first place. Her blunt speech and her polished taste. Her lack of deceit, and her wealth of sidesteps and safeguards. Nothing but a puzzle, in the end. Something for him to unravel.

She'll let the tears fall, now. No point in hiding them. Especially from her.  
  
Bedelia hasn’t questioned why Alana followed her to the car. Why she’s decided to stay here, refusing to fight and fail and save. If anyone would understand, Alana thinks, gratitude mixed in the horror now, it would be Bedelia.  
  
A union of the damaged. A union of the trapped. A union of the betrayed.

  
  
***

  
“He won’t follow us,” she tells Bedelia. Amazing how quickly Alana’s training clicks in, how simple it is now to analyze the man she thought she knew and the monster she never saw coming.

“He trusts you, and he has some… affection for me. As much as he's capable of.” She fastens her gaze on the hands gripping the steering wheel. On Bedelia’s long, pale fingers, the delicate rings, the clean, clear-coated nails.  
  
She swallows the last of the leftover adrenaline screaming in her veins. Reaches up a hand to rub her right collarbone, pressing her palm on her chest, an old compulsion she thought she’s left in medical school. “But I still don't understand. Why would you come back for me?”  
  
“You barely know me, not beyond the psychiatric circle. You would have had to be watching me, watching him, to have planned this. But you never went to the police.” The fire spreads back out through her veins. She clings gratefully to the blossom of anger, of suspicion, that distracts fro the fear. “You never told Jack. Why would you come back? Why bother to save me?”  
  
A long, impenetrable silence.  
  
“He… discussed you with me,” Bedelia finally replies. Such delicate inflections in her voice, little razor emphases that obscure and double her meaning with every word. “Marveled, I should say. You really have no psychiatric deficiencies. No neuroses. No demons. In a field like ours, that’s almost a weakness. But it never was, for you.”  
  
She pulls to the side of the road, shuts off the car, and turns toward her. Alana can smell lily, and the sharp musk of sandalwood, in the waft of perfume that comes as Bedelia's blonde hair swings forward. For a moment, Bedelia’s gaze is more straightforward, more insistent, than Alana has ever seen it. Then the shutters come down. She retreats behind the Sphinx-like smile, the reserved, removed gaze.  
  
“You didn’t need saving,” she murmurs. Locks Alana’s eyes in hers. “It wasn’t about saving you. It was about depriving him.”

 

***

Bedelia finds comfort in the smooth, silent motions of preparation and execution. Removing her makeup, cleansing her face, washing and cutting and prepping for dinner.  
  
Primavera. All clean flavors and bright colors, and no meat to be seen. There had been that moment when she had almost slipped with the knife, when a tremor ran through her hand, the traitor nearly causing her to cut, and she thought of sausage, and canapé, and ceviche, and veal —  
  
But she wouldn’t let herself think of that.  
  
She uncorks a riesling and takes a moment to inhale the sting as it breathes. A blessed moment of quiet within this silence. She’s felt it growing, like the thickness before a storm, crackling with unseen words. Growing heavy with Alana’s guilt, her unspoken accusations.  
  
She takes a sip to fortify herself, plates the table, and goes to fetch the elusive Dr. Bloom.  
  
“Alana.”

She sits in front of the muted television, tears visible on her face. Bedelia takes a moment to be jealous, fleetingly, of how open she can be with her emotions, how freed she seems in the sanctity of her grief. Then she places a hand gently on her shoulder, and Alana starts, looking up at her as though from a deep, dark well, and Bedelia knows Alana is as busy burying memories, being buried by them, as she is.  
  
“I think,” Bedelia says, choosing her words carefully, “that you should eat. It would do us both some good.”  
  
Alana stands, smoothing the front of her dark purple dress. The red-and-blue patterned scarf that once draped her neck lies forgotten at the chair’s back. Bedelia is about to lead her to the kitchen when she realizes Alana has no intention of moving further.  
  
“I can’t just ignore this.”  
  
There is a kindness to Alana, some essential warmth, that Bedelia has often admired from a distance and been exasperated by up close. She has marveled, in the moments when she has allowed herself to think of such things, how she remains both off-put and entranced by the way her eyes can seem so strong while still looking so soft.  
  
They don’t look so soft now.  
  
“I’m grateful for your help.” Alana sounds anything but. There are pricks of red in her milk-pale cheeks, heating the base of her neck and  tensing the hands that grip the chair’s back. There are tears in her voice. “I’ll never be able to erase what you did for me. But I have to know how much you knew.”  
  
Bedelia feels her chest tighten. There is a thin rasp of a breath trapped halfway out of her lungs. It feels like it's been there for years. “Dr. Bloom —”  
  
“Enough!” The force of one hand, lifting and slamming down, scrapes the chair brutally against the floor. Red floods Alana's face now, tears blazing in her eyes. “Did you even care that Will was in prison? Do you feel _anything_ about the role you played with your, your selfishness, your cowardice? Do you feel any of the guilt, because, God, I can’t — I can’t —”  
  
She hunches over the chair now, placing it between her and Bedelia, as she stares at the floor as though it might answer her. Or swallow her up. “I should have seen,” she whispers. Looks back up at her, voice raw. “I should have known.”  
  
Bedelia shakes her head, slowly, purposefully. Not to brush memories away, not anymore. To clear them.  
  
“I knew,” she whispers, and hears her guilt multiply in the echoed corners of the room. “Not at first, of course. I thought he was simply a borderline sociopathic personality, well-adjusted, well-concealed, able to see… clearer than most people. But by the time I left, I knew. I was afraid. I didn't want to die.” She can feel her own tears burning into the skin under her eyes, not liberating but scarring, marking her for the coward she is, and she would do anything to return to the calm detachment she held before she decided to come back. Before she decided to save her.  
  
And then Alana’s lips are on hers.

She won’t remember who moved first. But the mouth on hers is wet and hot, all soft lips and roses and yearning, and there is still an anger there, but it’s not directed at her, and as she feels Alana’s breasts press against hers, as she senses the hand that reaches up and tangles itself in her hair, all Bedelia can think is _yes_.  
  
Alana pulls back, for a moment, heaving, eyes wild. Bedelia can hear someone breathing hard, and realizes, with a small start, that it’s her. That for the first time a kiss hadn’t feel like a surrender, like falling into oblivion or being eaten alive. It had just felt ... good.  
  
“I’m such a hypocrite,” Alana breathes, letting out a shaky laugh, yanking a hand through her hair, and Bedelia cannot think of anyone who merits that description less. Bedelia struggles to focus on her words, not the leftover feel, the scent, of the woman in front of her.  
  
“If you don’t want this,” Alana says, “you need to tell me now. Because I'm so sick of someone looking to corrupt me, or possess me, or who needs me to _save_ them.” She juts out her chin, squares her shoulders, as though she’s facing a firing squad. “I want you. I need this.”  
  
Bedelia is much stronger than she looks. She grasps Alana’s wrists, pulls her close, and buries herself in her. Alana bites her bottom lip, teasingly, as Bedelia opens her mouth and brushes her tongue against hers, as they lose themselves, for a while, in the give and take.

When they reach the bedroom, Alana winds the knot of her dress in her fingers and tugs it open, revealing white lace lingerie, her panties already moist. She slips them off, throws them in corner, and waits.  
  
Bedelia swallows. She can’t remember ever being this discomfited, and this aroused. She still isn’t sure how, exactly, Alana managed to get the upper hand so quickly.  
  
“You’re beautiful,” she manages. Taking in her firm breasts, the pink nipples with the dusky shade underneath. The birthmark on her left ribcage that rises and sinks as she breathes in and out. The taut stomach, the soft, strong thighs. The wet, dark curls. The ravenous look in her eyes.  
  
Bedelia manages to slip out of her dress, but she can’t go further. Not yet. “May I?” she asks instead, and Alana gives a languorous nod and arches her back, mouth slightly open, each small pant a whisper of demand.  
  
She starts at the corner of her ear. Nibbling at the small lobe, kissing softly down near the base of her neck, along her collarbone, leaning over her to take her right nipple into her mouth, teasing it as she plays with the left with her pianist’s fingers. When she feels Alana start to shudder, she moves her way down, gently spreading her legs as she settles at the base of the bed, as she runs her hands lightly up and down her legs, as she spreads kisses along the insides of her thighs, each kiss an apology and a confession and a declaration.  
  
“Oh… oh.” Alana is a quiet lover, but Bedelia can feel her legs already quivering, see the slight up motion of her hips as she further arches her back, all delicious abandon and silent command. She presses her palms on Alana’s hips, forcing her down, and suckles at her folds, using her tongue to lap at her before sucking her clit between her teeth. Alana reaches a hand down and strokes the tips of Bedelia’s fingers, so lightly it’s like a feather’s touch. Then she tips her head back, ruts against Bedelia’s face, and clasps Bedelia’s hands in hers, riding against the wave of Bedelia’s tongue as a sweet spiciness reaches her lips and she laps eagerly at her clit, as Alana suddenly spasms and writhes and grows still.  
  
“Ahhh.” She smiles, a wide, brilliant smile, and for a moment Bedelia can see, even through the slant of cunt and hip and thigh, the same expression that captivated her the first time she saw her at one of Chilton's insufferable parties. Exalting and embracing, this woman whose thighs press her cheeks and who reaches, now, and pulls Bedelia up against her, wrapping those pale legs around her waist and kissing her fiercely.

Alana shifts, pulling Bedelia under her, and presses her mouth eagerly against hers, all hungry tongue and greedy lips. She reaches behind and unclasps Bedelia's black satin bra, sliding the straps from her shoulders as she straddles Bedelia’s waist. As she looks down.

“You’re perfect,” she says, like it’s nothing but a statement of fact, like there is no truth beyond that phrase, and then lowers herself back down, pressing against her, and lifts her hips to slide one hand between silk and skin.

And Bedelia writhes as Alana works in her, as her fingers pinch and pull and tease, as her other hand works with her mouth to claim every part of her neck and shoulders and lips and stomach. As she rips the panties free, turns to set her ass against Bedelia’s breasts, and buries her face in her cunt, sucking her clit and working in her fingers until Bedelia is screaming her name, has never known anything but _Alana Alana Alana_

She’s not sure if she dozed off, drifting in some post-coital comatose state, or if it’s only been a few seconds from when Alana first rolled off her, slung a leg over her hips, and wrapped an arm around her neck, nuzzling her close. The light has shifted, in any case, dappling on splayed limbs, fragile bodies.

“Our dinner,” Bedelia tries to say reprovingly, “is cold.”

Alana grins, eyes still closed, and snuggles closer. “Somehow, I think we’ll survive.”

Bedelia sits up slightly, nudging a few pillows into place, and brings Alana up with her, watching with aftershocks of pleasure as Alana flicks, almost lazily, at her right nipple, cups her breast in one hand. She lifts Alana’s hand to her mouth, turns it over, and kisses the delicate skin at her wrist.  
  
“I trust you,” she says, and knows as she does that a compact is forming here, a bond that's finally about something other than silence. “It's very difficult for me, to be able to tell someone. To let someone see me. Someone I can trust.”  
  
She looks down at Alana, at the mussed raven hair and the intent blue eyes and the body tangled in hers.  
  
“You need to know that it will go both ways. You can trust me. Always.”

“Good,” Alana says, and lunges.

 _Coup de foudre_ , Bedelia thinks, losing herself in the embrace. Like a strike of lightning.

 

***

It’s not until Alana has stepped out of the shower, until she's opened the bathroom door and started stepping into the hallway, that she realizes Bedelia has stopped playing Debussy halfway through his _Les sons et les parfums_.

Slowly, she slides out of the towel and sets it soundlessly on the floor. Reaches for the bag she’s taken to every room now, that she can’t stop toting with her even two days later, and digs inside. Takes slow, measured steps, gun in hand, to the main room.

She can see him when she peers around the doorless frame. Short curly blonde hair and a gesticulating, knife-wielding hand and a voice that sounds eerily like the cop on the phone, the cop — she curses silently — who she assured that yes, she was safe, yes, she was with a friend, yes she could give her address.

She sees him. But she notices Bedelia first.

“You’ve come to the wrong home,” she’s saying softly, in that same measured tone, and it’s only a slight shiver in her hands as she tucks back a section of glossy blonde hair, the sharpness in those ice blue eyes, that betrays just how terrified Bedelia really is. “I barely know Dr. Bloom. I think, perhaps, you should leave before you do something you regret.”

“You’re lying.” He sounds almost like he’s about to cry. Alana, trying her best to click off the safety without its usual gunshot blast, recognizes him as an old patient of Hannibal’s, one of the few he ever referred, one she thought had wound up in Chilton’s hospital years ago. Looking for his own taste of glory. His own chance to touch the divine by desecrating something else.

In one smooth motion, Alana clears the corner and fires, shooting a bullet into the man’s thigh and sending the knife skittering across the floor.

“Alana.” It rides off Bedelia’s tongue like the tail end of a gasp. As the man shrieks and clasps his hands to his thigh. As he looks up and sees the naked woman bearing down on him, breasts heaving, thighs still touched with moisture, hair wet and heavy. Holding the gun he’s staring down the barrel of.

“You’d think they’d learn their lesson by now,” Alana says, as Bedelia moves to wrap her arms around her waist. She cradles her from behind, protecting her as she looks, disdainfully, at one of the many men neither of them is willing to protect any longer.

“Percolations. Triggers. Cat nip to serial killers. No one blames the addict anymore, do they? They just want to call you a drug.” Bedelia smiles, nods. Glad the lesson has finally sunk in. “They want to blame us for not crumbling. Because we don’t break. Because we survive.”

And, miraculously, Alana laughs. The first laugh she's managed since Will went to prison. Bubbling out of her, overflowing, like something to wrap yourself in even as it pulls you under.

“Delia, darling,” she calls, as her lover finally untangles herself and moves to call the police. “How do you feel about Paris in the spring?”

 

***

Bedelia has wine. Alana has beer. They eat good food, and read to each other. They battle to see how many Freudian errors they can find in their students' papers. How many homages they can spot in the music Bedelia plays, in the art Alana has begun to draw.

And when they tumble into bed, it’s no longer to forget. It’s to remember.

**Author's Note:**

> Coup de foudre is French for "the lightning bolt," and means "to fall in love in an instant."
> 
> Thanks to tumblr's sad-cannibal-noises for the excellent prompt.


End file.
